Or do I hear someone crying?
CHAPTER IV
THE PIETY AND EGGS OF PATERSON
But in addition to mills and the falls, Paterson offered another subject of conversation. Only recently there had been completed there an evangelical revival by one “Billy” Sunday, who had addressed from eight to twenty thousand people at each meeting in a specially constructed tabernacle, and caused from one to five hundred or a thousand a day to “hit the trail,” as he phrased it, or in other words to declare that they were “converted to Christ,” and hence saved.
America strikes me as an exceedingly intelligent land at times, with its far-flung states, its fine mechanical equipment, its good homes and liberal, rather non-interfering form of government, but when one contemplates such a mountebank spectacle as this, what is one to say? I suppose one had really better go deeper than America and contemplate nature itself. But then what is one to say of nature?
We discussed this while passing various mills and brown wooden streets, so poor that they were discouraging.
“It is curious, but it is just such places as Paterson that seem to be afflicted with unreasoning emotions of this kind,” observed Franklin wearily. “Gather together hordes of working people who have little or no skill above machines, and then comes the revivalist and waves of religion. Look at Pittsburg and Philadelphia. See how well Sunday did there. He converted thousands.”
He smiled heavily.
“‘Billy’ Sunday comes from out near your town,” volunteered Speed informatively. “He lives at Winona Lake. That’s a part of Warsaw now.”
“Yes, and he conducts a summer revival right there occasionally, I believe,” added Franklin, a little vindictively, I thought.
“Save me!” I pleaded. “Anyhow, I wasn’t born there. I only lived there for a little while.”